I purchased the ingredients at the local homebrew store, which this time had the actual Rauch malt I wanted in stock. But this time, they didn’t have the Spalter hops I used last time, so I substituted 3.0 percent Saaz hops instead,.

The rest of the brew day was pretty uneventful. Here is what the beer looked like as I was putting it into the fermenter.

Rauchbier – pre-fermentation

The predicted specs for this beer were as follows:

Original Gravity: 1.056

Final Gravity: 1.012

5.7% ABV

7.2ºL

24 IBU

At the time I transferred the beer from primary to secondary, about three weeks after the brew day, I hit the 1.012 final gravity.

After about six weeks in secondary at lagering temperatures, I filtered the beer to try out the two micron Clarifier I had purchased from MoreBeer. I had tried the cartridge filter on previous batches (with disposable cartridges), but was not satisfied with the results (basically, nothing was filtered). I liked the idea of a reusable filter to go into my cartridge filter.

Filtering set-up with the Clarifier

The end result was similarly disappointing. In addition to taking vastly more time, which uses more CO2 gas to push the beer through the filter, the beer went into the receiving keg foamy. There also wasn’t anything noticeable removed by the filter, which explained why the beer wasn’t clear when I poured the first drafts.

Not very clear – Clarifier FAIL!

By the time I drew the last of this batch of beer almost two months later, it had cleared up nicely. I just wanted it to look like this from the start!